


The Hard Way

by Mangokiwitropicalswirl



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Missing Scene "Detour"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-25
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-08-27 00:11:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8379862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mangokiwitropicalswirl/pseuds/Mangokiwitropicalswirl
Summary: Missing Scene in the forest during "Detour"





	

The ground was hard, but she savored the way it made her bones ache. She was tired of soft hospital beds, how they adjusted and swiveled to minimize discomfort. She wanted to ache tomorrow, to feel uncomfortable and know that meant she was still a living body. Tonight, she sat on the solid, fragrant earth and almost felt roots growing down from her hipbones and spine, tethering her body to it. 

"I'm not gonna get tired," she'd told him. And she isn't, just stiff, Mulder's weight on her thighs having long ago cut off some circulation. She worries her thin nylon jacket won't be enough to keep her warm, wishes briefly for her old ugly green parka, but his body heat slowly spreads into her bloodstream. He sprawls in her lap, his nose angled into her denim thigh, his mouth slack as noisy breaths inform her he's soundly asleep. "I think you drooled on me," she imagines teasing him once he wakes up, deflecting any worry she feels for his injuries with his own brand of humor.

At least this time they aren't marooned on a rock in the middle of a lake. Or trapped in a Jeep on a mountainside with prehistoric bugs streaming in the vents. Comparatively, this is almost like camping. There was an almost campfire. An almost sing-along. All they needed now were some sleeping bags. 

She leans back against the crumbly log, a smile curving into her cheeks as she remembers his little innuendo and the way her casual response took him a bit by surprise. "Well, maybe if it rains sleeping bags you'll get lucky." 

This is how things are between them now, lighter. As if a window separating them has been slightly lifted, a clean honest breeze moving through them both. 

There was an ease, a matter-of-factness, in the way Scully had pulled him into her lap. "Has it been this way before?" she wonders. She remembers caring for him after she'd shot him, dressing the wound even as she undressed him in her bed. And finding him in shock in the motel shower that time he had tried to exorcise his demons through a hole in his head. But her hands remember those times, and how she'd moved like a doctor, detached and focused. 

Tonight she had cupped his drawn shoulders and stretched him down across her gently with a motion of familiarity and permission -- a permission given even if never stated outright. A motion not unlike his own clasping of her hands and brushing of his lips over her tightened fingers as she had lain in that soft hospital bed. Motion like his hand at her temple, curling a wisp of hair away from her face as he asked, "hey Scully, how 'bout those Yankees?"

For a moment, she lets her fingers thread through his hair, careful not to startle him. She smoothes her hands over the curve of his brow, lifting them quickly away before it becomes a caress. Her breath suddenly sticks in her throat as if she's been caught with her hand in a cookie jar. She jolts up and peers into the surrounding dark as if someone is watching. 

She is unwilling to explain these movements to herself. She is simply alive to the sensation of his body pressed against hers, her body pressed against the ground and the rough log at her back. She just wants to keep feeling the thrum of blood in her veins, the warmth pooling in the center of her lap where he lays. Keep inhaling the dank mustiness of the forest as it pushes against her nostrils. Keep tasting the pungent moisture in the Florida air. Listening to him breathe in and out, her heart speeding or slowing in response to the rise and fall of his chest. Cupping the hard muscles of his arms where they wrap around himself in sleep.

She had surprised herself a little when she asked him if he'd ever thought seriously about dying. She hadn't been able to look him in the eye, using her attentions to the shell casing as a little shield against the seriousness of the moment. Eddie Van Blundht had been right, the two of them didn't talk -- really talk -- much. But here they are, a few months and a few battles behind them since then, and she is trying. It is hard enough for her to tell him just a little of what she's learned from her cancer, the meaning she's still struggling to extract from the whole ordeal. 

He is part of that meaning, inextricably wrapped up in both her pain and her recovery. 

"Is that why you went to his room, Dana?" she asks herself softly in the dark. She's unsure even now what she had been hoping for, if she had been hoping for anything particular at all. She just knows she is tired of sitting on the other side of hotel room doors, pretending she doesn't want to be with him. 

Procuring a cheese plate had been a challenge --a small town grocer, a limited selection. She had settled for foil-wrapped soft cheese, a block of sharp cheddar and some soda crackers. She'd knocked playfully on his hotel door, three cheerful rhythmic knocks. Then she raised an eyebrow, smiling as she disclaimed, "may I remind you this goes against bureau policy regarding male and female agents consorting in the same hotel room while on assignment" - - a reminder of protocol she makes just so he'll notice how deliberately she is breaking it. How she is always breaking it for him. 

They'd bantered as she twisted the top off the bottle of cheap white from the corner market. He had looked bemused at her presence, eager to make jokes. When he bounded out the door, promising, "I'll get back and then we can build a tower of furniture. K?" there was that same lightness again, but some hesitation too, a pleasant deflection, as if something behind his eyes were saying, "Not yet."

What had she thought would happen if he'd stayed? She doesn't know, she isn't even sure of what exactly she wants, just that she remembers the soft brush of his lips against her cheek when he asked her to "say a few Hail Mulders" for him. Remembers her own hands' reluctance in that moment to let him go, pulling him back, her fingers telegraphing something her mind hasn't yet articulated. 

There had been a certainty in her body at that moment that startles her now to think about it, a clarity that had emerged when everything else had been stripped away. "I don't think I realized until now how much I rely on him... his passion," she had confided to Karen Kosseff, "he's been a great source of strength." It's the closest Scully has come to vocalizing the storm of emotions that engulf her when it comes to him, their work, her motivations. The plain truth is, when the tide of her life's trappings had receded to its lowest point, pulling everything out to sea with it, the hard bedrock that it revealed was him. 

 

The moon has risen through the trees, angling pale shafts of light through the clearing as if through cathedral windows. The soundless quiet they'd noticed the day before has stopped unnerving her, but the noise of her own thoughts gets louder. A phrase keeps running through her mind, "we choose to do these things, not because they are easy...". 

It's a phrase that had returned to her repeatedly in the hospital, when her brother and her mother, even her priest, had looked at her with questions in their eyes. She knew they questioned her choices, her commitment to her work, and most of all to Mulder. Laying there in her comfortable bed, life ebbing out of her, she questioned them too, but the phrase kept returning, "but because they are hard." Scully has always done the hard thing -- early graduation from medical school, a pathology residency that she compressed into half the normal time, the hard choice to leave medicine for the FBI. And now the X Files. She is used to doing things the hard way. She would have chosen to die the same way she had lived.

Maybe this is his appeal, that she knows it will be difficult. Theirs is going to be a hard road -- the road of caution and respect, of infinite patience, of missed signals, of bad timing. She smiles and pushes a tendril of now-damp hair behind her ear. She takes a long breath of the humid air into her cancer-free nostrils and feels as it slowly descends into her lungs, settling her, steadying her for whatever other detours lay ahead.

"Scully," Mulder suddenly whispers, his breath warm against her leg as he shifts positions, "what time is it?" 

She jerks back from her mind's wanderings and feels him still laying in her lap. "I don't know," she whispers, "it doesn't matter. Go back to sleep."

"Scully," he begins drowsily.

"Yes?" 

"I'm sorry we missed that wine and cheese reception."

"Oh Mulder," she sighs, "I didn't really want to go to that conference either, you know, or I wouldn't have let you talk me out of it so easily."

"No, not the one at the conference," his voice gravelly with sleep, "the one in my room."

She pauses, choosing her words carefully. "It's okay. Another time."

"I'm really sorry we're stuck out here."

"Don't be sorry," she answers, soothing his guilt with a soft touch on his arm, quickly steering the conversation in another direction. "It's such a beautiful night, I've almost forgotten about mothmen." 

He doesn't answer, but against her leg she can feel the small smile that creeps into his cheeks.

She studies the way the moonlight is sculpting shadows in the ferns. "It's been a long time since I've spent a night out in the open. It's actually kind of nice." Her words dissolve into the domed space of the clearing and he doesn't reply. Scully glances down and sees that his eyes have drifted shut again. She runs her hand along his arm a few times, coaxing him back to sleep.

 

The phrase that had been running through her head returns and settles into a groove, "we choose them not because they are easy, but because they are hard." Catching a glimpse of the half-full moon through the leaves, she wracks her brain again trying to remember its origin.

And then it comes to her -- it's JFK's moonshot speech. 8th grade history class and her research report on the space program. It was just one of those phrases whose cadence had a kind of melody that easily lodges itself in the memory. "Apollo 11," she thinks, "of course," smiling at the memory of Mulder's birthday gift.

More of the speech comes back to her as she almost hears Kennedy's New England accent intoning, "all great and honorable actions are accompanied by great difficulty.... We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard ... because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept"

"Willing to accept," Scully mouths under her breath, sighing. This life, this path, is not easy. A heavy dampness has begun to settle into her jeans and she knows she'll need to work the kinks out of her back come morning. There's a report to write and excuses to make for their absence from the conference. There's injuries that need mending and expenses to justify. There's dirt and blood and sweat and confusion. There's him. 

And then she realizes the important part of the moonshot speech is that it's not really about hard things, but about decisions. It isn't the difficulty that makes a thing -- a life -- meaningful, it's the choosing. 

Her chest constricts and Scully feels her heart flare up, bright and hot as struck gunpowder, and make her choice. Her mind chose him years ago, her body chooses him now, and her heart, she knows, will choose him again and again, no matter how hard.


End file.
